Hi
Just wondering if there is a link to this ??
Thnx
Sue
Anch’io non lo trovo
@sue1 @nickhislam We’ve just recorded the pre-test, which means that Tom will be starting streaming soon - I’ll share the link once it’s up!
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Posted some more info in here:
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I wish I had seen this earlier and been able to join in. Any chance you will run it later in the year?
They’re going to be doing one intensive day per month for Italian. You can do it by yourself any time, too.
The idea is simply to use the app for a ridiculous number of hours. At the end of the official intensive day, there may be a Zoom chat to see how much you can actually use.
So if you’ve done roughly 10 hours of Italian in the app by early February, you will hopefully be at the same level as Tom and Aran when they do the next one. And if you’ve done more than that and are ahead of them, I suppose you could tune in just to watch them suffer? 
I think throat lozenges and/or drinks of hot lemon and honey may be needed if you do the full 10 hours.
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Does such intensive cramming work beyond a few days or weeks? I’m curious as to whether that approach actually embeds the language long-term
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Well, the theory is that it works just fine. The SSi team is pretty confident of this, and they’re pretty much doing the intensive days as a proof of concept.
Stay tuned!
Do they have any follow-up interviews with past students etc to show the long-term retention?
I’ve used ssiw for Welsh and did learn phrases but just curious about the intensive days specifically
There may be interviews, I’m not certain. You can check the YouTube channel.
@stephen-14 I believe that participants of the S4C programme “Iaith ar Daith” did the SSiW intensive days to get ready for it.
They’re all celebs so you might find something on the web about their experience or interviews - besides their “performances” in the programme itself, which, I seem to remember, was filmed soon after their course, so not really related about long-term retention - but still interesting I guess.
Even though I never did the intensive days, from my experience I could add:
in summer 2018 I did all Level 1 and Level 2 of the Welsh course in about a month and a half, starting from basically zero knowledge if the language, apart from having heard a few Datblygu songs (as many here know 
) and done a few lessons of Duolingo - never even heard it spoken once before.
I visited Wales six months later and did pretty well.
Then did all the course again one year later (faster - both levels one after the other in less than a month), and noticed I remembered a lot of it.
And even now, actually most of those sentences - or parts of them - are definitely, permanently stuck in my memory!
Yes, I’ve watched a few Iaith ar Daith and enjoyed them, but again, I am still a little sceptical that intensive cramming of vocabulary has long-term benefit (I did a degree in modern languages and such techniques only ever got me through an exam, I know I’ve lost almost all the vocabulary I crammed in in those times!)
I should add that I’ve used SSiW in a less intensive way and found it certainly helpful and I’ve remembered many of the phrases, it’s more the incredibly intensive approach I’m sceptical about.
Will be interesting to see if more comes out on the long-term retention from SSiW 
I have to say that one reason that might make SSiW more effective in an intensive type of learning - is that there’s not really a lot of vocabulary in it.
It’s more about “figuring out” the basics of the structure of the Welsh language rather than trying to remember a lot of words in a very short time - which I’d find unlikely to stay in long term memory.
It’s like anything else. If you don’t use knowledge or vocabulary fairly regularly, it fades. I even forget English words I haven’t used in years, and it’s my first language. There’s no magic trick to remembering a long list of “whatever you are trying to remember” in isolation. You just have to actively use what you have learnt. This is why spaced repetition is so valuable when it comes to remembering vocabulary or anything really.
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